This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, January 30th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Kim.com has not gone quietly in both launching a new product and marking the anniversary of the controversial seizure of his site

mega upload is essentially begging the US to revisit our copyright laws.

Tim Lee, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute evaluates the status of copyright today.

There's been a trend for the last 20 years or so of copyright law becoming more and more strict with more and more enforcement powers.

And we had a big sort of watershed moment a year ago when the internet protests against the

Stop Online Piracy Act, and it looks like the momentum for additional enforcement measures has slowed down a little bit.

But we still have a lot of laws on the books that I think are problematic.

And the government has been ratcheting out the use of those powers so that the powers have been

on the books for a few years but the government's become more and more aggressive I think in the

way it's been using them.

Now the recording industry I think learned a valuable lesson in not going after pre-teen

girls when it comes to you know enforcing their own copyrights. How have industries

altered the way they lobby the government? How have

altered the way they lobby the government and how has the government responded to to that pressure? Yeah, so there's been a shift. If you go back a decade ago or a little less than a decade ago you would have seen this

campaign where the recording industry decided was sort of directly trying to

enforce his copyright both against intermediaries that it thought were

engaging infringement and also end users.

And as you said, that sort of turned out to be a PR disaster.

And so what's happened more recently is that they managed to sort of deputize the government

or convince the government to do a lot of their enforcement for them.

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